Worker arraigned in posting of sign
‘Whites only’ label intended as joke
NIAGARA FALLS — It didn’t take long for the city worker accused of putting a “whites only” sign on a public works drinking fountain to realize it was a really bad idea.
“There’s going to be trouble,” a co-worker predicted shortly after James Curtis put up the sign Aug. 13 in the public works yard, according to court papers filed in the case.
Curtis, 52, of 80th Street, a 26- year employee in the Public Works Department, told police before his arrest last Friday that he took down the sign after he realized he might get in trouble.
By that time, an African-American co-worker had photographed it with his cell phone.
Curtis said he confessed last week to posting the sign because his conscience got the better of him, although not before he lied about his involvement when first confronted by Detective Frank Coney.
“I lied because I was scared,” Curtis said in court papers reviewed by The Buffalo News after the motor equipment operator’s arraignment Tuesday in City Court.
Last Friday, Curtis told Coney and David Kinney, the city’s director of public works and parks, that the sign was a joke.
“It wasn’t racial,” he said. “I didn’t do it to be mean, and it’s been eating me up.”
Curtis said he had been suffering headaches since word of the sign was publicized a few days after he put it up.
He told police he had handwritten the sign, which read “whites only drinking fountain” in upper and lower case letters, on the back of a time card. He said he threw the sign in the garbage after a fellow white co-worker predicted it could cause problems.
Court papers do not make it clear how, but a black co-worker ended up with the sign after he
photographed it on the drinking fountain. In his statement to police, the worker told detectives he took the sign, put it in his locker and later gave it to Emmett Cox.
Cox and five other African- American public works employees — collectively known as the Niagara Falls Six — filed a still-pending racial discrimination suit against the city in 2003.
An investigation of the sign by police and the state attorney general’s office soon followed.
“Mr. Curtis didn’t mean to hurt anyone’s feelings. He is definitely not a bigot,” Harvey F. Siegel, his attorney, told The Buffalo News Tuesday morning, following his client’s arraignment in City Court.
“Of course [he] didn’t mean for it to go this far.”
Curtis pleaded not guilty to second-degree aggravated harassment, which normally is a misdemeanor.
But city police, who filed the charge Friday, categorized it as a racially motivated hate crime, which bumps up the charge to a Class E felony.
Curtis entered the courtroom Tuesday morning surrounded by the media, and wearing dark glasses and a dark blue baseball hat.
A preliminary hearing on the charge was scheduled for Oct. 14, and his $500 bail was continued.
Curtis was bailed out after his arrest Friday. After the Tuesday court appearance, Siegel said Curtis has been receiving support from members of the African-American community, including family and friends, although a black man nearby who saw the media spectacle exclaimed, “I hope he’s fired.”
Mayor Paul A. Dyster said Friday his administration has “zero tolerance” for discrimination in the work place and that the city has started disciplinary proceedings against Curtis.
The city has stepped up diversity training in response to the Niagara Falls Six lawsuit.
But several officials, including those on the city’s Human Rights Commission, still urge doing more.
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